Social media's popularity has boomed in the past 2 decades. Ever since the advent of MySpace in 2003, the concept of social media has taken the internet by storm and has proven to be extremely popular with netizens. After MySpace came a bunch of other platforms - Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, TikTok etc. In our current year 2022 you can expect almost everyone under the age of 30 to be active on at least one social medial platform, not to mention the sizable portion of people over that age who use it. However, beneath the surface of an easy way to connect with people and an easy way to access content lie much darker facts about these platforms that I wish to present to the average reader in this article.
I'll start off with the most obvious issue and one that I'm sure many regular users have thought of - where do social media platforms get their money? You don't have to pay anything when making an account and you don't ever have to pay afterwards, so how do they get the revenue stream necessary to pay for operational costs and also make a profit on top of that? The answer is quite simple - if something is free, then you are the product.
It is true that there are paid adverts on social media platforms, but those could never pay for the costs of the servers and the salaries of the workers alone, let alone also turn up a profit. Adverts represent, at best, a supplement to the main source of income.
The main revenue stream of social media platforms comes from investors, usually investing companies. These investors don't give out money for free, though - they expect to receive something in exchange that will net them a profit for their investment. And that something is, drumroll please...the users' personal information. What a shocker, right? No one could've seen that coming!
Bland attempts at humor aside, the users' personal information that is used when signing up and that is shared throughout the users' use of the platform is useful for advertisers. Utilizing it, they can launch targeted and personalized adverts to each user in part, boosting their chances that the user will click and perhaps buy the advertised product. One might think that it's not so bad at first. What could some advertisers do to you? And truth is, it's not the advertisers that are the problem, they're mainly concerned with profit and couldn't give a rat's ass about who you are outside of your advertising profile. The problem stems from governments and other malicious actors.
You can be sure that any social media company will bend over at the sight of a court order for a person's sensitive information. Why would they put their entire organization at risk for one measly person's privacy? They logically won't. If the police ask for it, they'll hand over everything they have - account details, chat logs, post history, location history, the list can go on. Without talking too much about the current political climate that is shaping society into more and more of a dystopian police state, you can rest assured that governmental intelligence services have easy access to such sensitive information from social media platforms as well. History has proven time and time again that corporations and the government tend to go hand in hand and that neither of them have your best interests in mind.
As a fun bonus to show you just how untrustworthy the owners of social media giants are, here's a chat log of Facebook owner Mark Zuckerberg and a friend of his from Harvard on the subject of sensitive information that Mark could provide to his friend if he needed it. Res ipsa loquitur:
There is also the issue of database breaches. One simple look at HaveIBeenPwned's breached websites list will put in perspective just how prevalent these security breaches are...and these are just the publicly known ones. A quick look over that list shows us that many social media websites have already had database leaks, with some as recent as 2021(Facebook)(!). Whenever a website's database gets breached and released, anyone who gets their hands on it will have access to a plethora of sensitive information. It depends on what you yourself provide when you sign up and as you use the website, but generally you can expect the following details to be leaked in such a breach if it happens on a social media platform:
I could keep going, but I've made it obvious by now that it's no bueno if you are a victim of such a database leak on a social media platform. On to the next section of this article...
Social media is like soda. Sure, it can be nice in small amounts, but in excess it becomes harmful. Funny videos, pictures of cats, memes and such offer a nice respite, a way to turn your brain off and just have some mindless fun, but if it's the only type of content you expose yourself to everyday then it's going to start having a negative effect - your mind atrophies in the absence of intellectual stimuli.
There is also the fact that the way people represent their lives on social media tends to be artificial and sterilized, skewing appearances in an attempt to make themselves appear like exceptional people living a great life. There are also those terminally online who spend the entirety of their free time virtue signaling, sharing bogus clickbaity "articles" from low-quality news sites and generally being a nuisance. The world of social media is a world of fakeness that gives off the impression of being the norm, but it's not. Don't let it shape the way you see the world.
Like I mentioned in my Fundamental Basics of Vigilance article, doxxing is a huge problem in our day and age. Social media facilitates that - having a presence on it puts you at an even higher risk of being deanonymized due to the sheer amount of personally identifiable information concentrated in one place. Even something as apparently innocuous as the lists of people who liked your photos can end up being used in a dox attempt.
There are a plethora of bad actors who can benefit from the oversharing of sensitive information on social media: stalkers, robbers and identity thieves, to name a few. Posting a picture of where you are while on vacation (and perhaps adding a location as well)? Congratulations! You have just alerted anyone seeing that post that you aren't home and that you're in a certain location at a certain time.
Taking into consideration everything I have outlined in this article, the average netizen's social media activity is very dangerous to themselves. Hell, just having a social media presence in general is dangerous - even if you don't use the account much and don't share a lot of personal information, data about you can still be leaked in a breach and there are other security holes inherent to social media that can be present.
The ideal solution would be renouncing all social media, but that is a difficult measure that most aren't ready to take or can't take due to various circumstances (needing to stay in touch with various people and having no other practical way to do so, for instance). Therefore, I recommend that those who choose to continue using social media platforms in spite of the risks take measures to protect themselves by minimizing the amount of sensitive information they share on it, limiting the time they spend on it and making sure to tweak their accounts' privacy settings (as much as you can tweak them for optimal privacy on a platform designed specifically to breach your privacy, anyway) in order to minimize the risks.